Icebergs

» see icebergs.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Pinterest announced on 30 July 2014 that it had acquired Icebergs, and in the same breath that Icebergs would close. Users had until 1 September to pull their files out. César Isern joined as a product manager and Albert Pereta as a product designer, both of them moving from Barcelona to San Francisco. It was Pinterest's fifth acquisition, after Punchfork, Livestar, Hackermeter and Visual Graph, and like most of those it was a purchase of two people rather than of a thing.

What closed was a tool for the mess that collects around creative work. You threw screenshots, reference images, links and PDFs at a board, laid them out the way you wanted them, and shared the board with whoever else was on the project. One writeup in 2013 called it the Evernote for creative minds, which undersells how much of the appeal was that it looked good. Isern and Pereta were designers who had been consulting between New York and Barcelona before they built their own thing, and it showed in every pixel of it.

The product was in private beta through the spring of 2013 and opened up later that year. By the summer of 2014 the founders were describing a community in the hundreds of thousands. For an eighteen-month-old app with eight people on it and no American office, that was a real audience.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ dear penguins ~

The farewell letter went up on the homepage and stayed there for months. It opens "Dear Penguins", which was what the founders called their users, and it closes "Stay cool!", and in between it does something the genre usually avoids. It says what they were trying to do. "Over a year ago, we set out to create a private space in the cloud for you to save, organize and collaborate around your projects like never before."

Then the line that is doing the real work: "We took care of every single detail and put our souls into it, but it was hundreds of thousands of creative minds around the world who trusted us and helped us grow beyond our expectations." Nobody writes that sentence about a product they were bored of.

~ the export window ~

A month's notice with a working export is better treatment than most of this site's residents gave anyone. Dropmark, a competitor, built an Icebergs importer and published instructions, so there was somewhere for the data to land. Icebergs had done the same favor in the other direction a few months earlier: in February 2014 it shipped an importer for Zootool, another bookmarking service that was fading, and wrote a blog post walking people through the move.

So the archive of this one small company contains both halves of the same courtesy, performed a year apart, in opposite directions.

~ what pinterest wanted ~

None of the Icebergs code went into Pinterest. That was said openly at the time and nobody pretended otherwise. Pinterest in 2014 was a company with tens of millions of users and a visual product it needed to keep making better, and the two people who had designed Icebergs were worth more to it than the thing they had designed.

I was not the audience here. Icebergs was for people whose work is visual and who need a place to put references, and I write software. The closest I come is a folder of screenshots with no structure in it at all, which is the problem Icebergs was built to solve and the reason I never looked for a tool to solve it.

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